Emrys Awakening
by Turnpike
Summary: AU. How did an untrained peasant boy learn reading and the rudiments of sorcery on the edge of the kingdom without attracting the notice of the witchfinders or his own kind? In the ascent to greatness, an underprivileged child will fight to survive the Middle Ages and his own dark passions-or failing that, usher in a new Dark Age...


Balinor had never intended to stay in Ealdor this long. It was against the nature of a dragon lord to settle. His father, and his father before him, had lived the greater part of their lives on dragonback. The desire to move had not died with the dragons. It was bone-deep, blood-fast, and no more eradicable than the Old Magic.

Had he been prone to reverie, he might wondered if it was true, the old tales that said the great dragons assumed human form and lay with the priestesses at Imbolc, so spawning the race of dragonlords. Or perhaps he might have suspected, as did certain learned men, that the dragons did not name him their brethren and kin without cause. There were those who believed that men shifted their shape like a god, that death worked his own magic on great souls. Balinor, however, was like the great dragons in that he was a not a speculative man.

It was the nature of the man, and not the dragon lord, that caused him to rest here long after he had been healed.

Hunith was not a beautiful woman. Her virtues were in the work of her hands. It was those hands that had healed him, that wrestled and coaxed a crop from the rocky sediment, and prepared this harvest into meals as plain and satisfying as herself. Simple and unschooled, if she had any especial talent to distinguish her from the other peasants, it was basic diligence. Where her neighbours had long since let their wattle huts leak, hers was patched regularly, even if it left no straw for the floor. Where other houses crowded with smoke from the fires and rushlights, hers vented through a single hole in the roof, a dubious contrivance in place of a chimney. And unlike every other house, hers smelt cleanly of dried grass, if only because she was too poor to afford livestock to share it with her.

However this domicile was distinguished by these marks of her character, it would still have been a poor home for Balinor, had there not been one other aspect that marked out Hunith from the peasantry and raised her above her humble lodgings.

Hunith was a wisewoman, her mother a half-tutored druidess who had learnt the healing art before the death of her mentors, and who had managed to impart the least incriminating aspect of her craft to her bastard daughter before her untimely death. Balinor knew only of it through Gaius, the court physician tutored in infancy by the same group, who had maintained contact through the years. These connections were often the only thing standing between freedom and execution, and were so a closely guarded secret. It was not spoken of between them.

He guessed though, at her parentage from the odd signs she made on his slaughter of a coney, the holly bushes watered assiduously even in drought before the open door of the house, the green man and norfolk runes crudely carved on an overhead beam. He was older than he looked, and he had seen these symbols perfected before, under the hands of High Priestesses.

So it was that against himself, almost, he began to teach her.

It had been half a lifetime since he had last read, in his childhood in the monastery, but his mind was keen, and he remembered the words. At night that first winter, after her hands were raw from spinning and her feet frostbitten bloody from running barefoot through the snow; he would coax her through the seemingly useless task of literacy, spelling out letters with twigs in the snow until it melted, and then in the spring mud.

In a town with no books, she had taken to this task with no enthusiasm but all of her usual compliance. This obedience might have itself cast doubt on her parentage, had Balinor not seen proof that extended only to himself. No priestess could have called down the wrath of heaven like Hunith cursing a man for burdening his wife with child so soon after the last pregnancy had nearly killed her.

Perhaps she had some dim vision of the future herself that compelled this easy obedience. Or perhaps she was overwhelmed by him as she could not be by any of her own people. More than a dragonlord, he was nobility in his own right, the bastard son of a lonely old Dame in the South, whose Lord had been long away in the East. She had been forgiven upon his return. He had not been. Given to the monastery, his heritage would have remained a mystery had he not been called upon to drive a dragon from the nearby town, through prayers and fasting.

He was worldly, as dragonlords were, and had slept with many women and cared for none, as dragonlords did. It had been that way for time without memory, and when their seed took root, as it rarely did, they were usually not present to claim it.

This time was no exception.

And the boy borne to Hunith might have grown up in ignorance and poverty, or more likely, been executed, or abducted by the Sidhe, or taken by the Druids, except Gaius heard of it.

So it was that with the reluctance of Hannah, Hunnith then surrendered her son to apprentice under Brother Celyn, an itinerant monk and healer; with the stern injunction to never, under any circumstances, display his abilities.

I was six when I joined Celyn, and almost immediately, he despaired of ever civilizing me. Not that my appearance or manners shocked him in the least. He was a servant of the people. Unlike his superiors, who could hardly be stirred from the abbey except to collect tithes and indulgences, he lived under any roof charity gave him, and paid for his board by his services.

And unlike his peers, this was his choice rather than an assignment. Celyn was nobly born, albeit the fifth son by the second wife of a very minor noble, and enjoyed a suspicious degree of favour and patronage from the Duchess at Dolbadarn. While these connections might have given him virtue enough for a bishophood, he had chosen to forego use of them. Instead, he worked alongside brothers drawn from the merchant class and the clever peasantry. Even then, he eschewed the easier tasks of a learned man, preferring his ministry in the remote mountains to a post in the grammar schools of an established city.

Celyn then was not offput when the boy's mother presented him as was-dressed in one of two smocks of coarse linen, dusty and sunburnt from running water from the river up to the garden all morning, and stinking of sweat. He simply took the dark-haired boy by the chin, peering into his pale blue eyes in the way of a man examining a potential purchase. He crouched to the boy's level.

"What's your name, boy?" he demanded.

"Merlin, father," the boy replied, with a convivial respect so dissimilar to both the timidity and brashness children seemed to alternate between at that age.

"And what do you know, Merlin?"

The boy answered without pause. "I know a lot of things, father."

"Oh?"

"I know the healing herbs, and how to spell my name and mother's and the names of the kings, and how to grow plants and tend fires. And Gethin promised to teach me to set snares when I'm older."

The priest smiled. And under the roof of Huthin that night, when they conversed on herblore and traded thoughts on remedies, he noticed the boy listening. He removed an old, leatherbound bible from his bag, and set it before the boy.

"Now. Will you read to me, Merlin?"

The boy's eyes skimmed the page, and his brow creased in confusion.

"This isn't English."

"No. But say the words."

They toiled over the book for the rest of the evening, and in the morning, when it was time to leave, the priest took the boy with him.

By birth and circumstances, Celwyn was capable of dealing with any kind of men, and perfectionist as he was, he would expect no less of me. So it was from the beginning that he began to beat the rudiments of a classical education into my thick pate. However busy he was at villages we stopped at, he always set aside at least an hour a day to review my latin and criticize my reading from his ancient Bible. As for the other aspects of my education, I probably learnt more from Celwyn's endless lectures on the ways than I would have at a grammar school.

For Celwyn, I suspect now, had only half taken me on as a favour to Gaius and out of respect for the Old Blood. The man was a born teacher. In that first summer, as we wandered along the coastline towards the region of Llyn, and Camelot, I learnt history, which is to say, I learnt politics. I knew Cenred's people had come from the North after being driven south by the Normans, and his large garrison had been idle for too long. I knew Dunbadarn was ruled by Sir Pellinor, and that Lady Gwyneira often ruled in his stead while he wintered at Camelot, fighting Uther's wars. And I learnt of the persecution of sorcerors.

None of this was as effective, however, as what I learnt firsthand.

The first time I ever saw another of my kind was in a fishing village at the edge of Uther's reach. Celwyn was bargaining with a Dutch merchant for salted cod, and I was trying and failing to parse out what their garbled Latin meant. The village was large enough to support a few shops alongside a small wayhouse, and it from there I saw her.

She was no different in appearance than any other peasant woman: barefoot, her frock loose and girdle half-tied, as she pretended to inspect the merchant's wares. Her eyes were not following her hands, when I noticed her dextrously slip a small salted cod into her wide sleeves. I caught her glance by accident. She winked. Turning gracefully as any noblewoman, she slipped the salted cod into her covered basket. She was continuing down the street when a man coming from the opposite way caught sight of her and froze.

He was a wealthy merchant, from his look-leather shoes, finespun dyed linen, with cunning embroidery on his shirt hem. And he was livid red as he seized the woman by her jaw.

"Whore!" he cursed, grabbing her about the waist with the other hand. "Thief!"

The woman screamed with admirable alacrity.

"Who are you? Sir? Unhand me! I haven't the least notion of what you mean-"

Perhaps the woman might have managed to wit her way out of this situation, had it not been for the intervention of our fish merchant.

"Now, now-what seems to be the problem-"

The man threw her down in the dirt, and her basket went sprawling-out of which spilled a carton of spices, and the salted cod.

The merchant stared at it in disbelief for a moment before his countenance darkened and he grabbed for the girl himself, who righted herself as easily as a tiger turned on its back, ducking under his arms and heading straight past me. The men pursued her, and she met my glance for moment, and grinned in passing. A whispered word later, and the men running down the narrow gap between the stalls found the planks collapsing down on them.

Celwyn ushered me into the relative safety of the wayhouse while the men roused themselves for the chase.

All evening, I was distracted as Celwyn compounded prescriptions for the sailors and gave and received seeds of medicinal herbs for the gardens at the abbey and Dunbadarn. It was midnight when the men returned, and if my mentor was also not asleep, he did not stop me as I left the hearth and peered out the door.

Celwyn never tried to protect me from the facts of life. That was not uncommon in this age. What was uncommon were his motives. Where other guardians watched executions with their wards all in good fun, Celwyn watched them to punish himself, a reminder of his failures to the people. And he allowed me to watch them as a reminder of what might happen if I failed myself.

The men returned. There were less of them than I remembered, and several were tugging along a travois laden with something heavy. The two in the forefront forced the woman foreward, gagged and bound, kicking her forward as she tripped on her frock, and I watched avidly as they came past the door in the moonlight.

The woman's eyes were blacked, and her hair torn out in patches, and she was bleeding from cuts in her sides. Her shoulder looked humped and I realized it was dislocated, and those little breathy noises that I'd taken for the sounds of far-off cats in season were her screams through the gag.

She looked the best of the lot.

The men towards the front had apparently had the good fortune not to be the first to catch the witch, and were still fresh. Their fellows towards the back were less well off. Two men were nude and missing half their hair, and had enormous burns down their bodies. A third was bleeding badly from a massive puncture wound in his side. The massive bodyguards, with minor burns of their own, and one newly missing an eye, pulled the travois.

On it rested the bodies of the merchants.

I ducked aside the doorway when I realized they were coming through to rouse Celwyn.

"Healer! Healer!"

Celwyn was up immediately, and the men were brought in for his examination. Neither of us were to get any sleep that night. Celwyn kept watch over the fish merchant and the man with the pierced side while I ran back and forth; fetching cool water from the springs, honey from the merchant stalls for antiseptic, culling fresh dock by torchlight to be stewed into poultices.

As for the man who first declaimed the witch, they had only brought back his body.

By dawn, the man with the pierced side was dead, and Celwyn did not have high expectations for the life of the fish merchant. If the burns did not become infected, he would be heavily scarred.

As for the woman...

The men had been as busy in preparing death as Celwyn and I in preventing it. The wan light of dawn saw us stand before an immense dead oak. Tied to it stood the exhausted witch, the defiance not yet beaten out of her face, and the ruined planking of the merchant stalls jumbled about her. Costly whale oil-worth a prince's ransom-had been spilled on the slats and over the angry wench by the dead merchant's grim bodyguard.

I was six. I didn't know what she had done, beyond stealing the fish and perhaps stealing from her dead accuser. I did not know how a single woman had managed to kill two men and fatally injure a third, or why she would dare, when every other woman I'd seen bowed her head and accepted the acts of men like acts of God.

I did know that I might have tried to stop it-loosened her gag, given her breath to speak one further spell, or knocked the torchbearer aside with a blast of will.

I did not.

She met my eyes. The confusion of guilt, fear, and relief I felt as she went up in smoke has never left me since.


End file.
